Maybe I'm slow, but I can't think of any single word that means the act ofintendingto do anything, except in highly specific contexts - such as registration, which could in context be interpreted as the act of intending to vote. In practice, it seems to me any such "act of intending" could only be some necessary precondition for the actual intended activity (or inactivity, in OP's case) to take place.
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FumbleFingersNov 11 '11 at 12:55

Has no one mentioned "laissez-faire" (in its original French sense) yet? I sometimes refer to it as lazy/fair, because that's my opinion of its effect on the economy (lazy government = do nothing = fair).
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barrycarterNov 11 '11 at 18:06

21 Answers
21

Not sure about "the act of intending to do nothing", but idling is the "act of doing nothing":

v.intr.
1. To pass time without working or while avoiding work.
2. To move lazily and without purpose.
3. To run at a slow speed or out of gear. Used of a motor vehicle.v.tr.
1. To pass (time) without working or while avoiding work; waste: idle the afternoon away.
2. To make or cause to be unemployed or inactive.
3. To cause (a motor, for example) to idle.n.
1. A state of idling. Used of a motor vehicle: an engine running quietly at idle.
2. A mechanism for regulating the speed at which an engine runs at rest: set the idle >higher to keep the motor from stalling.

As you admit yourself, nihilagent doesn't have anything to do with intention. The more common idler can at least be converted to an "act" (idleness), but I don't think nihilagency would fly.
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FumbleFingersNov 11 '11 at 13:16

I'm still trying to get my head around whether it makes sense to ask for a word meaning the act of intending to do xxx at all, regardless of what xxx actually is. Perhaps laziness could be paraphrased as intention to do nothing, but it's hard to see how to convert that into an action.
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FumbleFingersNov 11 '11 at 13:56

I am not sure. Often times procrastination is not intentional.
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user6751Nov 11 '11 at 16:50

4

Procrastination implies that action will eventually be taken at a later time and that the person is just stalling and avoiding doing anything. I don't think the OP wants to give the impression that they intend to do something later.
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FrustratedWithFormsDesignerNov 11 '11 at 20:50

Accidie is my favourite in this area, but it really just means laziness. Anomie (or anomy) is more promising: from the Greek for 'lack of law', it can mean lack of direction, and hence inability to do anything:

We are facing a condition of anomie, of planlessness in living, which is becoming characteristic both of individual lives and of communities.

But it appears to have been infected by sociology:

B. Wootton Social Sci. & Social Pathol. ii. 69 " Sociologists have thought it worth while to coin a special term—‘anomie’—to describe the unorthodox social values, norms and attitudes to which ‘underprivileged’ children may be conditioned."

Besides this, I have a shrewd suspicion that what OP is actually looking for is "intending to do nothing but drink beer" for which the technical term is weekend.

Like most of the answers, I'm going to somewhat ignore the "intending" part of the question. I believe the OP may have meant "deliberately" doing nothing, rather than planning to deliberately do nothing in the future.

Therefore, I suggest "meditating", which refers to a variety of practices that are actually probably pretty different from one another, but many of which could be thought of as doing nothing in about as deliberate and focused a way as is possible for doing nothing.

"Killing time" covers the intent and the action parts, though I have to say that it is hard to make a case for a separate word that means the "act of intending to do X". As Yoda might say, "X or not X, there is no intend (unless X=intend)"

I think killing time is subtly different: doing either something unimportant or nothing in particular whilst waiting for something to happen. "I had some time to kill whilst waiting for the train, so had a look around to admire the grand Victorian architecture." "I killed time waiting for the gasman by rearranging the cutlery drawer."
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HugoNov 13 '11 at 10:28

"... often seen as the ultimate incarnation of the superfluous man ... Oblomov was compared to Shakespeare's Hamlet as answering 'No!' to the question "To be or not to be?" Oblomov is a young, generous nobleman who seems incapable of making important decisions or undertaking any significant actions. Throughout the novel he rarely leaves his room or bed and famously fails to leave his bed for the first 150 pages of the novel."
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HugoNov 14 '11 at 21:32